“Everything is designed as a 60Hz game. We expect this to be 60Hz on every supported platform,” says John Carmack, founder and technical director of id Software, as he prepares to show off the 360 and PS3 versions of Rage. And indeed, the PC hardware on which we see the demo running is doing just that, albeit with some heavy screen tearing. “The work remaining is getting it locked so there’s never a dropped frame or a tear, but we’re confident that we’re going to get that,” he continues.

Creative director Tim Willits takes up a 360 pad and programming director Robert Duffy a Sixaxis, and they begin to simultaneously play on the two consoles from where the PC demo started, through a battle with bandits and into Wellspring. The 360 version matches the PC’s 60fps, but the textures on many surfaces currently flick visibly between resolutions as you move toward and away from them, while the PS3’s framerate runs at just 20-30fps. “The PS3 lags a little bit behind in terms of getting the performance out of it,” Carmack acknowledges. “The rasteriser is just a little bit slower – no two ways about that. The RSX is slower than what we have in the 360. The CPU is about the same, but the 360 makes it easier to split things off, and that’s where a lot of the work has been, splitting it all into jobs on the PS3.”

A Mac version has been touted from Rage’s first reveal, too, but Duffy says it’s not being shown today because it’s running behind the other versions by a week. “We have been treating the Mac as a first-class citizen throughout the development,” he assures. “I’m using a Mac as my main development system and Tim is using one as his. We don’t know if we’re going to be Snow Leopard specific yet – we’re waiting on support from Apple – but it’s looking right and we have no major issues with it.”

Rage is designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform production, and id knows the bulk of its market is on console. It’s a decision that has caused something of a change of culture at id. “You can play it with keyboard and mouse on PC, but it’s been a company-wide dictum that Tim will whack you if you’re playing with the mouse,” Carmack says. “The game needs to play well with the controller because most people are going to wind up playing it like that.”

Such concurrent cross-platform development is what id Tech 5 was designed to accomplish. The base data that composes the scenes we see on the PC demo is identical to that we see on PS3 and 360 – and any other platform on which id decides to put Rage – so the comparatively small team of artists and designers that is making Rage’s world is making only one set of assets to fit all.